Unearned Luck

Photo by Alex Blăjan on Unsplash I greatly appreciate Fr. Matthew Schneider's (@FrMatthewLC) brief reply to my post, There Is No Secret To Reverse Parish Closings , via his Twitter account on May 11. As before, I wish to address the four points he raises in his reply, then move to a discussion of a larger topic. I greatly respect Fr. Schneider and am eternally grateful for his priesthood and the beautiful witness it is to the world. I will now address his Twitter comments very briefly. 1.     Fr. Schneider first addresses his writing style, describing it as "brief & with catchy headlines to hopefully increase readership." Alright. Increasing readership is an admirable goal for one devoted to evangelizing the masses via Twitter, but shouldn't a little more thought be given to what is being offered to them? While it may be important to form Catholics to evangelize the world, the issues raised in my earlier article requires evangelization and catechesis of t...

Photo by Nathaniel Tetteh on Unsplash On May 8, 2018, Fr. Matthew P. Schneider, LC, of the Archdiocese of Washington, D. C. published to his blog on Patheos.com  an article entitled,  The #1 Secret to Reverse Parish Closings . While I am not in any way disparaging Fr. Schneider and I do hold him in the highest regard, I do mean to put an end to the lazy, thoughtless, and enduringly unproductive advice he restates, advice which finds relevance only in the small positive feedback loops in which it is circulated like pot at a Willie Nelson concert. We, as Catholics, seem to have a macabre horror of considering as relevant anything that finds Catholics or the Catholic Church at fault for its own problems. Fr. Schneider's oft-repeated trope, that "parish closures come from demographic factors like Catholics moving to the suburbs, ethnic parish attendance dropping, and the population decline of the rust belt," is a perfect example of this mindset.  Other than the ...